[Copy-edited and spell-checked by Scott Atkins, September 1995. Tagged in html, October 1995.]

THE WORLD OF WRESTLING

The grandiloquent truth of gestures

on life's great occasions.

Baudelaire

The virtue of all-in wrestling is that it is the spectacle of excess. Here we find a
grandiloquence which must have been that of ancient theaters. And in fact
wrestling is an open-air spectacle, for what makes the circus or the arena what
they are is not the sky (a romantic value suited rather to fashionable
occasions), it is the drenching and vertical quality of the flood of light. Even
hidden in the most squalid Parisian halls, wrestling partakes of the nature of the
great solar spectacles, Greek drama and bullfights: in both, a light without
shadow generates an emotion without reserve.

There are people who think that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is
not a sport, it is a spectacle, and it is no more ignoble to attend a wrestled
performance of Suffering than a performance of the sorrows of Arnolphe or
Andromaque.* Of course, there exists a false wrestling, in which the
participants unnecessarily go to great lengths to make a show of a fair fight;
this is of no interest. True wrestling, wrongly called amateur wrestling, is
performed in second-rate halls, where the public spontaneously attunes itself to
the spectacular nature of the contest, like the audience at a suburban cinema.
Then these same people wax indignant because wrestling is a stage-managed
sport (which ought, by the way, to mitigate its ignominy). The public is
completely uninterested in knowing whether the contest is rigged or not, and
rightly so; it abandons itself to the primary virtue of the spectacle, which is to
abolish all motives and all consequences: what matters is not what it thinks but
what it sees.

This public knows very well the distinction between wrestling and boxing; it
knows that boxing is a Jansenist sport, based on a demonstration of excellence.
One can bet on the outcome of a boxing-match: with wrestling, it would make
no sense. A boxing- match is a story which is constructed before the eyes of
the spectator; in wrestling, on the contrary, it is each moment which is
intelligible, not the passage of time. The spectator is not interested in the rise
and fall of fortunes; he expects the transient image of certain passions.
Wrestling therefore demands an immediate reading of the juxtaposed meanings,
so that there is no need to connect them. The logical conclusion of the contest
does not interest the wrestling-fan, while on the contrary a boxing-match
always implies a science of the future. In other words, wrestling is a sum of
spectacles, of which no single one is a function: each moment imposes the total
knowledge of a passion which rises erect and alone, without ever extending to
the crowning moment of a result.

Thus the function of the wrestler is not to win; it is to go exactly through the
motions which are expected of him. It is said that judo contains a hidden
symbolic aspect; even in the midst of efficiency, its gestures are measured,
precise but restricted, drawn accurately but by a stroke without volume.
Wrestling, on the contrary, offers excessive gestures, exploited to the limit of
their meaning. In judo, a man who is down is hardly down at all, he rolls over,
he draws back, he eludes defeat, or, if the latter is obvious, he immediately
disappears; in wrestling, a man who is down is exaggeratedly so, and
completely fills the eyes of the spectators with the intolerable spectacle of his
powerlessness.

This function of grandiloquence is indeed the same as that of ancient theater,
whose principle, language and props (masks and buskins) concurred in the
exaggeratedly visible explanation of a Necessity. The gesture of the vanquished
wrestler signifying to the world a defeat which, far from disguising, he
emphasizes and holds like a pause in music, corresponds to the mask of
antiquity meant to signify the tragic mode of the spectacle. In wrestling, as on
the stage in antiquity, one is not ashamed of one's suffering, one knows how to
cry, one has a liking for tears.

Each sign in wrestling is therefore endowed with an absolute clarity, since
one must always understand everything on the spot. As soon as the adversaries
are in the ring, the public is overwhelmed with the obviousness of the roles. As
in the theater, each physical type expresses to excess the part which has been
assigned to the contestant. Thauvin, a fifty-year-old with an obese and sagging
body, whose type of asexual hideousness always inspires feminine nicknames,
displays in his flesh the characters of baseness, for his part is to represent what,
in the classical concept of the salaud, the 'bastard' (the key-concept of
any wrestling-match), appears as organically repugnant. The nausea voluntarily
provoked by Thauvin shows therefore a very extended use of signs: not only is
ugliness used here in order to signify baseness, but in addition ugliness is
wholly gathered into a particularly repulsive quality of matter: the pallid
collapse of dead flesh (the public calls Thauvin la barbaque, 'stinking
meat'), so that the passionate condemnation of the crowd no longer stems from
its judgment, but instead from the very depth of its humours. It will thereafter
let itself be frenetically embroiled in an idea of Thauvin which will conform
entirely with this physical origin: his actions will perfectly correspond to the
essential viscosity of his personage.

It is therefore in the body of the wrestler that we find the first key to the
contest. I know from the start that all of Thauvin's actions, his treacheries,
cruelties and acts of cowardice, will not fail to measure up to the first image of
ignobility he gave me; I can trust him to carry out intelligently and to the last
detail all the gestures of a kind of amorphous baseness, and thus fill to the brim
the image of the most repugnant bastard there is: the bastard-octopus.
Wrestlers therefore have a physique as peremptory as those of the characters
of the Commedia dell'Arte, who display in advance, in their costumes
and attitudes, the future contents of their parts: just as Pantaloon can never be
anything but a ridiculous cuckold, Harlequin an astute servant and the Doctor a
stupid pedant, in the same way Thauvin will never be anything but an ignoble
traitor, Reinieres (a tall blond fellow with a limp body and unkempt hair) the
moving image of passivity, Mazaud (short and arrogant like a cock) that of
grotesque conceit, and Orsano (an effeminate teddy-boy first seen in a blue-
and-pink dressing-gown) that, doubly humorous, of a vindictive salope,
or bitch (for I do not think that the public of the Elysee- Montmartre, like
Littre, believes the word "salope" to be a masculine).

The physique of the wrestlers therefore constitutes a basic sign, which like a
seed contains the whole fight. But this seed proliferates, for it is at every turn
during the fight, in each new situation, that the body of the wrestler casts to the
public the magical entertainment of a temperament which finds its natural
expression in a gesture. The different strata of meaning throw light on each
other, and form the most intelligible of spectacles. Wrestling is like a diacritic
writing: above the fundamental meaning of his body, the wrestler arranges
comments which are episodic but always opportune, and constantly help the
reading of the fight by means of gestures, attitudes and mimicry which make
the intention utterly obvious. Sometimes the wrestler triumphs with a repulsive
sneer while kneeling on the good sportsman; sometimes he gives the crowd a
conceited smile which forebodes an early revenge; sometimes, pinned to the
ground, he hits the floor ostentatiously to make evident toall the intolerable
nature of his situation; and sometimes he erects a complicated set of signs
meant to make the public understand that he legitimately personifies the ever-
entertaining image of the grumbler, endlessly confabulating about his
displeasure.

We are therefore dealing with a real Human Comedy, where the most
socially-inspired nuances of passion (conceit, rightfulness, refined cruelty, a
sense of 'paying one's debts') always felicitously find the clearest sign which can
receive them, express them and triumphantly carry them to the confines of the
hall. It is obvious that at such a pitch, it no longer matters whether the passion
is genuine or not. What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion
itself. There is no more a problem of truth in wrestling than in the theater. In
both, what is expected is the intelligible representation of moral situations
which are usually private. This emptying out of interiority to the benefit of its
exterior signs, this exhaustion of the content by the form, is the very principle
of triumphant classical art. Wrestling is an immediate pantomime, infinitely
more efficient than the dramatic pantomime, for the wrestler's gesture needs no
anecdote, no decor, in short no transference in order to appear true.

Each moment in wrestling is therefore like an algebra which instantaneously
unveils the relationship between a cause and its represented effect. Wrestling
fans certainly experience a kind of intellectual pleasure in seeing the
moral mechanism function so perfectly. Some wrestlers, who are great
comedians, entertain as much as a Moliere character, because they succeed in
imposing an immediate reading of their inner nature: Armand Mazaud, a
wrestler of an arrogant and ridiculous character (as one says that Harpagon**
is a character), always delights the audience by the mathematical rigor of his
transcriptions, carrying the form of his gestures to the furthest reaches of their
meaning, and giving to his manner of fighting the kind of vehemence and
precision found in a great scholastic disputation, in which what is at stake is at
once the triumph of pride and the formal concern with truth.

What is thus displayed for the public is the great spectacle of Suffering,
Defeat, and Justice. Wrestling presents man's suffering with all the
amplification of tragic masks. The wrestler who suffers in a hold which is
reputedly cruel (an arm- lock, a twisted leg) offers an excessive portrayal of
Suffering; like a primitive Pieta, he exhibits for all to see his face,
exaggeratedly contorted by an intolerable affliction. It is obvious, of course,
that in wrestling reserve would be out of place, since it is opposed to the
voluntary ostentation of the spectacle, to this Exhibition of Suffering which is
the very aim of the fight. This is why all the actions which produce suffering
are particularly spectacular, like the gesture of a conjuror who holds out his
cards clearly to the public. Suffering which appeared without intelligible cause
would not be understood; a concealed action that was actually cruel would
transgress the unwritten rules of wrestling and would have no more
sociological efficacy than a mad or parasitic gesture. On the contrary suffering
appears as inflicted with emphasis and conviction, for everyone must not only
see that the man suffers, but also and above all understand why he suffers.
What wrestlers call a hold, that is, any figure which allows one to immobilize
the adversary indefinitely and to have him at one's mercy, has precisely the
function of preparing in a conventional, therefore intelligible, fashion the
spectacle of suffering, of methodically establishing the conditions of suffering.
The inertia of the vanquished allows the (temporary) victor to settle in his
cruelty and to convey to the public this terrifying slowness of the torturer who
is certain about the outcome of his actions; to grind the face of one's powerless
adversary or to scrape his spine with one's fist with a deep and regular
movement, or at least to produce the superficial appearance of such gestures:
wrestling is the only sport which gives such an externalized image of torture.
But here again, only the image is involved in the game, and the spectator does
not wish for the actual suffering of the contestant; he only enjoys the perfection
of an iconography. It is not true that wrestling is a sadistic spectacle: it is only
an intelligible spectacle.

There is another figure, more spectacular still than a hold; it is the forearm
smash, this loud slap of the forearm, this embryonic punch with which one
clouts the chest of one's adversary, and which is accompanied by a dull noise
and the exaggerated sagging of a vanquished body. In the forearm smash,
catastrophe is brought to the point of maximum obviousness, so much so that
ultimately the gesture appears as no more than a symbol; this is going too far,
this is transgressing the moral rules of wrestling, where all signs must be
excessively clear, but must not let the intention of clarity be seen. The public
then shouts 'He's laying it on!', not because it regrets the absence of real
suffering, but because it condemns artifice: as in the theater, one fails to put the
part across as much by an excess of sincerity as by an excess of formalism.

We have already seen to what extent wrestlers exploit the resources of a
given physical style, developed and put to use in order to unfold before the
eyes of the public a total image of Defeat. The flaccidity of tall white bodies
which collapse with one blow or crash into the ropes with arms flailing, the
inertia of massive wrestlers rebounding pitiably off all the elastic surfaces of the
ring, nothing can signify more clearly and more passionately the exemplary
abasement of the vanquished. Deprived of all resilience, the wrestler's flesh is
no longer anything but an unspeakable heap spread out on the floor, where it
solicits relentless reviling and jubilation. There is here a paroxysm of meaning
in the style of antiquity, which can only recall the heavily underlined intentions
in Roman triumphs. At other times, there is another ancient posture which
appears in the coupling of the wrestlers, that of the suppliant who, at the mercy
of his opponent, on bended knees, his arms raised above his head, is slowly
brought down by the vertical pressure of the victor. In wrestling, unlike judo,
Defeat is not a conventional sign, abandoned as soon as it is understood; it is
not an outcome, but quite the contrary, it is a duration, a display, it takes up
the ancient myths of public Suffering and Humiliation: the cross and the pillory.
It is as if the wrestler is crucified in broad daylight and in the sight of all. I have
heard it said of a wrestler stretched on the ground: 'He is dead, little Jesus,
there, on the cross,' and these ironic words revealed the hidden roots of a
spectacle which enacts the exact gestures of the most ancient purifications.

But what wrestling is above all meant to portray is a purely moral concept:
that of justice. The idea of 'paying' is essential to wrestling, and the crowd's
'Give it to him' means above all else 'Make him pay'. This is therefore, needless
to say, an immanent justice. The baser the action of the 'bastard', the more
delighted the public is by the blow which he justly receives in return. If the
villain--who is of course a coward-- takes refuge behind the ropes, claiming
unfairly to have a right to do so by a brazen mimicry, he is inexorably pursued
there and caught, and the crowd is jubilant at seeing the rules broken for the
sake of a deserved punishment. Wrestlers know very well how to play up to
the capacity for indignation of the public by presenting the very limit of the
concept of Justice, this outermost zone of confrontation where it is enough to
infringe the rules a little more to open the gates of a world without restraints.
For a wrestling-fan, nothing is finer than the revengeful fury of a betrayed
fighter who throws himself vehemently not on a successful opponent but on the
smarting image of foul play. Naturally, it is the pattern of Justice which matters
here, much more than its content: wrestling is above all a quantitative sequence
of compensations (an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth). This explains why
sudden changes of circumstances have in the eyes of wrestling habitues a sort
of moral beauty: they enjoy them as they would enjoy an inspired episode in a
novel, and the greater the contrast between the success of a move and the
reversal of fortune, the nearer the good luck of a contestant to his downfall,
the more satisfying the dramatic mime is felt to be. Justice is therefore the
embodiment of a possible transgression; it is from the fact that there is a Law
that the spectacle of the passions which infringe it derives its value.

It is therefore easy to understand why out of five wrestling matches, only
about one is fair. One must realize, let it be repeated, that 'fairness' here is a
role or a genre, as in the theater: the rules do not at all constitute a real
constraint; they are the conventional appearance of fairness. So that in actual
fact a fair fight is nothing but an exaggeratedly polite one: the contestants
confront each other with zeal, not rage; they can remain in control of their
passions, they do not punish their beaten opponent relentlessly, they stop
fighting as soon as they are ordered to do so, and congratulate each other at
the end of a particularly arduous episode, during which, however, they have
not ceased to be fair. One must of course understand here that all these polite
actions are brought to the notice of the public by the most conventional
gestures of fairness: shaking hands, raising the arms, ostensibly avoiding a
fruitless hold which would detract from the perfection of the contest.

Conversely, foul play exists only in its excessive signs: administering a big
kick to one's beaten opponent, taking refuge behind the ropes while ostensibly
invoking a purely formal right, refusing to shake hands with one's opponent
before or after the fight, taking advantage of the end of the round to rush
treacherously at theadversary from behind, fouling him while the referee is not
looking (a move which obviously only has any value or function because in fact
half the audience can see it and get indignant about it). Since Evil is the natural
climate of wrestling, a fair fight has chiefly the value of being an exception. It
surprises the aficionado, who greets it when he sees it as an anachronism and a
rather sentimental throwback to the sporting tradition ('Aren't they playing fair,
those two'); he feels suddenly moved at the sight of the general kindness of the
world, but would probably die of boredom and indifference if wrestlers did not
quickly return to the orgy of evil which alone makes good wrestling.

Extrapolated, fair wrestling could lead only to boxing or judo, whereas true
wrestling derives its originality from all the excesses which make it a spectacle
and not a sport. The ending of a boxing-match or a judo-contest is abrupt, like
the full stop which closes a demonstration. The rhythm of wrestling is quite
different, for its natural meaning is that of rhetorical amplification: the
emotional magniloquence, the repeated paroxysms, the exasperation of the
retorts can only find their natural outcome in the most baroque confusion.
Some fights, among the most successful kind, are crowned by a final charivari,
a sort of unrestrained fantasia where the rules, the laws of the genre, the
referee's censuring and the limits of the ring are abolished, swept away by a
triumphant disorder which overflows into the hall and carries off pell-mell
wrestlers, seconds, referee and spectators.

It has already been noted that in America wrestling represents a sort of
mythological fight between Good and Evil (of a quasi-political nature, the 'bad'
wrestler always being supposed to be a Red). The process of creating heroes in
French wrestling is very different, being based on ethics and not on politics.
What the public is looking for here is the gradual construction of a highly
moral image: that of the perfect 'bastard'. One comes to wrestling in order to
attend the continuing adventures of a single major leading character, permanent
and multiform like Punch or Scapino, inventive in unexpected figures and yet
always faithful to his role. The 'bastard' is here revealed as a Moliere character
or a 'portrait' by La Bruyere, that is to say as a classical entity, an essence,
whose acts are only significant epiphenomena arranged in time. This stylized
character does not belong to any particular nation or party, and whether the
wrestler is called Kuzchenko (nicknamed Moustache after Stalin), Yerpazian,
Gaspardi, Jo Vignola or Nollieres, the aficionado does not attribute to him any
country except 'fairness'--observing the rules.

What then is a 'bastard' for this audience composed in part, we are told, of
people who are themselves outside the rules of society ? Essentially someone
unstable, who accepts the rules only when they are useful to him and
transgresses the formal continuity of attitudes. He is unpredictable, therefore
asocial. He takes refuge behind the law when he considers that it is in his favor,
and breaks it when he finds it useful to do so. Sometimes he rejects the formal
boundaries of the ring and goes on hitting an adversary legally protected by the
ropes, sometimes he reestablishes these boundaries and claims the protection of
what he did not respect a few minutes earlier. This inconsistency, far more than
treachery or cruelty, sends the audience beside itself with rage: offended not in
its morality but in its logic, it considers the contradiction of arguments as the
basest of crimes. The forbidden move becomes dirty only when it destroys a
quantitative equilibrium and disturbs the rigorous reckoning of compensations;
what is condemned by the audience is not at all the transgression of insipid
official rules, it is the lack of revenge, the absence of a punishment. So that
there is nothing more exciting for a crowd than the grandiloquent kick given to
a vanquished 'bastard'; the joy of punishing is at its climax when it is supported
by a mathematical justification; contempt is then unrestrained. One is no longer
dealing with a salaud but with a salope--the verbal gesture of
the ultimate degradation.

Such a precise finality demands that wrestling should be exactly what the
public expects of it. Wrestlers, who are very experienced, know perfectly how
to direct the spontaneous episodes of the fight so as to make them conform to
the image which the public has of the great legendary themes of its mythology.
A wrestler can irritate or disgust, he never disappoints, for he always
accomplishes completely, by a progressive solidification of signs, what the
public expects of him. In wrestling, nothing exists except in the absolute, there
is no symbol, no allusion, everything is presented exhaustively. Leaving
nothing in the shade, each action discards all parasitic meanings and
ceremonially offers to the public a pure and full signification, rounded like
Nature. This grandiloquence is nothing but the popular and age-old
image of the perfect intelligibility of reality. What is portrayed by wrestling is
therefore an ideal understanding of things; it is the euphoria of men raised for a
while above the constitutive ambiguity of everyday situations and placed before
the panoramic view of a univocal Nature, in which signs at last correspond to
causes, without obstacle, without evasion, without contradiction.

When the hero or the villain of the drama, the man who was seen a few
minutes earlier possessed by moral rage, magnified into a sort of metaphysical
sign, leaves the wrestling hall, impassive, anonymous, carrying a small suitcase
and arm-in-arm with his wife, no one can doubt that wrestling holds that power
of transmutation which is common to the Spectacle and to Religious Worship.
In the ring, and even in the depths of their voluntary ignominy, wrestlers
remain gods because they are, for a few moments, the key which opens Nature,
the pure gesture which separates Good from Evil, and unveils the form of a
Justice which is at last intelligible.